David

I have lately come to an interesting discovery as to why most education centered blogs tend to become “blogging in education” centered blogs. Not long after I started blogging I became disinterested in blogging because so much of it was inward focused on the merits of blogs in education. Once I got over that and started to focus on writing about the things that I was interested in (and finding other sources that were more focused on those things) I began to really appreciate the potential power of blogs. As I began to blog more I became acutely aware of the potential power that is lost because of the lack of participation within our professional community. Basically it comes down to the fact that the adoption rate is not high enough yet. That brings me to begin pushing for ways to get more people involved and aware of the benefits and power of blogging which means that I have started blogging more about blogging than I used to. My only disclaimer is that I am also pushing other educational bloggers to take their message back to the traditional outlets and to refine their message to be more effective in promoting the wider adoption that will really lend power to the medium of blogging. We can use the blogs as a platform to solve the issues related to adoption, but in the end we must take the solution outside of the blogosphere or slse it remains nothing more than an unproven theory of how to get people involved. Update – see Scott Adams’ Conversations about starting a blog for another good perspective on this subject.

Thank you Nate for sending exactly the message that more people in AECT and education need to hear. In Why Blog II you have reminded us of the essence of what we need to tell the current non-participants. unfortunately those non-participants will never see your message because they are not participating. My latest quest is to get the blogging community to recognize the need to take our message back to the traditional outlets of information distribution and Nate has given me the perfect example to work with.

Rovy suggested a non-proposal for a non-session at AECT. I don’t want to fully reject the idea, but it seems to contradict the idea I had in first suggesting a session. If “the only publicity is through blogs” we virtually invite ourselves to keep preaching to the choir. The point of having a session was to bring the discussion to those who are not participating in the blogosphere. After reading the post on the AECT news blog I am thinking that perhaps we should contact the Radical Thinkers of Penn State to see if we could learn from their experience or possibly even enlist their help. Back to Nate and Rovy. . .

I do believe that there is a connection between Critical Mass and the Long Tail. They are not separate, but part of the same continuum. You are right that if the long tail “GETS a critical mass, it ceases to…

Rovy has taken my previous post exactly where I wanted it to go. I agree on all his points. The educational bloggers with the highest rankings are still worth reading for those who are not wholly into the technology side of things, but we meeds to develop those “unexplored corners of the blogosphere” so that they do not require so much digging to find. I have been doing this for months and I still have not found the kind of variety that we need. I believe that those well-known members of our field need to find a way into the discussion. We need to get the variety farther up the tail. And if anyone can direct me to some of those hidden places of variety I would be most grateful.